


Pulse

by 8611



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, F/M, Mild Gore, Minor Violence, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-22
Updated: 2013-07-22
Packaged: 2017-12-21 01:11:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/894039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/8611/pseuds/8611
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>this is Allison Argent's war story, after the pulse, after she is drafted, after Scott (and before him, at the end).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pulse

**Author's Note:**

> So there's a totally awesome war stories ficathon going on [over here](http://anythingbutgrey.livejournal.com/811021.html), and I grabbed the prompt _teen wolf; team human; i'm only human, i come with knives_. Obviously it got away from me just a bit (i.e. - a giant bit and a half).

She is born to a woman with steel shoulders and a man with scars across his palms. They tell her stories of stars when she is young, of bright lights and giant cities. Stories about the ships in deep orbit that were left to drift in the black after everything happened. 

She’ll meet a boy, later in life, with close-cropped hair and a toothy smile, who goes a bit quiet when people mention the pulse. His eyes skip across her face as he plays with a buttonhole on his shirt and worries at his bottom lip. 

“My mom was up there,” Stiles tells her, even later, when they’ve been drinking and Lydia has her head in his lap (she’s watching Allison though, her eyes sharp). 

“I’m sorry,” Allison says, and she means it.

(Her mother has red on her hands and red on her skin and her clothes and Allison is trying to stop it, trying to hold back a river with human hands.)

“You know how it goes,” Stiles says, shrugging, and Allison nods, because she does. 

\---

They found each other after everything had happened, after the draft. 

“Well that’s some shit luck,” Kate tells her when Allison calls her after her number shows up in the morning paper. 

“Seriously,” Allison says as she scrolls through the other numbers on her tablet, although it lacks heat. Kate enlisted; Allison doesn’t begrudge her that. 

“How’s your dad?”

“Coping.”

“And you are too?”

“Yeah,” Allison says. 

“Well, I guess I’ll be seeing you soon, kiddo.”

After they hang up Allison picks up one of her knives from where it’s sitting on her desk, staring at it for a moment before she throws it across the room. 

It stays embedded in the wall until she ships out.

\---

Allison is born to a steel woman and a scarred man and she is born human. She grows up hearing the stories about how humans went to the stars, and came home, built on the technology they had learned from the black. 

Something happened out there, something besides tech got brought back, and the people who went back to the stars were only playing at being human. They called them h+.

Her parents tell her these stories, of the tall, lithe, almost-humans with something alien, something robotic, in them, something that makes them a bit harder to kill, a bit harder to read.

She is told to stay away from them, she is told to watch out for them after the pulse, when her father and mother vanish for stretches at a time and come home more worn. 

(And the time her mother leaves home for the last time in a box of bone and ash.)

Scott, though, she knows Scott is good, and she’s not wrong. 

\---

Lydia is her bunkmate. She’s got hair past the regulation length and refuses to cut it, choosing instead to braid it and wind it up at the back of her head. 

“It’s my hair,” Lydia says, like this is the most basic thing possible. 

(Later, Allison will run her fingers through it, when this is over, and Lydia can let her braid down.)

There are four of them in that room in the end, Lydia and Allison, and Danny and Stiles. 

“I probably just should have enlisted,” Danny says one night, when they’re jogging on the track behind the barracks. “My family’s all military.”

“But?” Stiles prompts, because Stiles is a splinter. 

“There was a guy,” Danny says, like it’s nothing, but Allison recognizes something in his words. 

She finds him later, when it’s almost lights out and Lydia and Stiles are still missing. 

“H+?” She asks, and he looks at her in confusion for a moment. “Your guy.”

“Yeah,” Danny says, quietly, and they spend the rest of the night side by side, making sure their side arms and combat knives are in working order. 

\---

They follow a trail that leads to nowhere, and probably never will. 

“I heard they’ve gone underground,” Greenberg says one day, and everyone rolls their eyes, because Greenberg has never been a great source of truth. 

This time, though, it turns out to be true. What’s left of the h+ on earth is underground, waiting it out. There have been organizations trying to get them out, back into the black, and it’s working slowly, like a trickle of water through the cracks of the earth.

She thinks of Scott probably too often, remembers his lips and his hands and his heartbeat. She finds it hard to believe that Scott is anything other than human, the way he fits against her perfectly.

\---

“When the pulse hit, my mom was up there,” Stiles says. “She was a pilot.”

“You’re half?” Danny asks, and Stiles shakes his head. 

“No, she was human. There were a couple of recon shuttles in orbit.”

“Collateral.”

“Yeah, exactly.”

They’re in a sim, their backs to a burnt out car as they wait for orders. 

“I saw an old photo of a protest once, back before we left the system, that just said ‘shit is fucked up and bullshit’,” Danny says, and that makes Stiles laugh - really laugh - throw his head back against the car. 

“Pretty much,” Stiles says, grinning. “Pretty fucking much.” 

When the sim finally drops, after they’ve both been hit, the woman in charge of their squad leaves them standing in an empty wire frame room. 

“You’re only human,” Morrell says, like they haven’t heard that a thousand times before. “You need to think faster.”

Stiles just sighs, long and low, and Danny watches him out of the corner of his eye and sees frayed edges.

\---

Allison is born human. Lydia is born human. Stiles, Danny, so many of their friends growing up, all born human. 

Scott is born h+. So is Ethan. So are thousands of others who were left to die in orbit after the pulse was sent out from a desperate humanity. 

(The lucky ones were in a low enough orbit that they ended up falling back to earth, burning up in atmo or smashed to a pulp on the surface of the earth. The lucky ones weren’t the majority.)

“We use old school tech here,” Morrell tells them the first day they’re drafted. Everyone knows that. “The pulse means we rely on analogue and manual and hand-to-hand.”

Allison has been raised to do this, so she excels. She goes through the motions. She makes friends with Lydia and Stiles and Danny and they go running in the evenings, after dinner, as the sun is dying on the horizon. 

“This war is a lot of sitting around,” Stiles huffs one night, when they’re sitting on the track infield. 

“Wars always are,” Allison says, twisting grass between her fingers. 

They’re shipped out the next day to go find an h+ stronghold. All they find is a burning town, with a man roped to a tree on the outskirts, one of the standard issues combat knives sticking out of his forehead. 

“That right there,” Morrell says, “is a warning.”

“Drama queens,” Stiles mutters, and Allison can’t help the small grin. 

They take the man down, flies buzzing around their heads, their hands tacky with mostly dry blood, and bury him in a shallow grave. 

His tag chip has been dug out of his neck, so they don’t know his name, but he was human. 

\---

“Do you know where the h+ live now?” Chris asks her one night, when he’s sitting on her bed and she’s working on schoolwork, papers spread out across her bed. 

“Obviously,” Allison says, because the government is crappy at keeping secrets, especially when her parents are both government contractors. 

“Good,” Chris says, and moves to stand. “Watch the news tonight.”

“I will,” Allison says. 

“And take your knives out of the tree out back.”

(They’d been there since the night her mother died, when her blood was on Allison’s hands.)

She goes to collect them later, after the sun has set, and then sneaks out of the yard, texting Scott as they go.

She meets him in front of an electronics store, in front of a plate glass window and dozens of TVs, like in an old movie, and they watch the news, hand in hand. 

Allison wants to scream, wants to punch something, wants to draw blood and wants to never see another drop of blood at the same time, and Scott just squeezes her hand tighter as they watch an EMP take out the h+ colony in orbit. 

“I think…” Scott takes a deep breath. “I think that can kill some people. If they’re older. More machine.”

It can, and it does. 

(Allison has nightmares about it killing Scott, over and over and over again, even in the dark after she’s drafted and Lydia is there to curl around her and press a hand over her heart.)

“I know what you’re feeling,” Danny says one day, when they’re watching a shooting star that could be a shuttle. 

“Do you know where… where he is?”

“Ethan. No, I don’t. Do you know where --“

“Scott.”

“- is?”

She shakes her head, staring at the disassembled gun at her feet before she takes her knife out of its holster against her thigh and holds it up.

“Let’s go do something stupid,” Allison says, grinning. 

They find a tree just a bit outside camp, and peel back lines of bark with the knife to reveal the flesh underneath. 

(D.M. + E.W.

A.A. + S.M.)

\---

It is raining, and Allison feels it in her shoulder, the one she was shot in. 

“I’m getting old,” she tells Lydia, and Lydia just rolls her eyes, adjusts her umbrella. 

(It is bright red, it’s always bright red.)

“You’re not even 35 yet,” Lydia says, somewhat diplomatically, avoiding saying _30_. It is a sin in Lydia’s book to admit her age, to act, or look, her age. 

“Getting there,” Allison says, rubbing her shoulder. 

They stop in front of the wide window of a bar, and watch the news. It is about the new deep space mission, the next step to leave the system again. Maybe it will go better this time. 

“That can only end in tears,” Lydia sighs before checking her watch. “We should get moving if we want to meet Stiles and Danny.”

The Zurich streets are slick with water, reflecting the lights of the cars as they cross the road. 

When Allison looks up from her feet, out from under her umbrella, she sees someone in the distance, and her breath catches. 

The man across the road finds her eyes, and when he smiles the air comes rushing back, surrounding Allison in the humidity of the rain, the comfort of something else. 

(His eyes still catch the light and flash red at the edges, always bright red.)

“Are you coming?” Lydia asks, and Allison turns to look at her. “Or are you going to whine about getting old and slowing down again?”

“It happens,” Allison says, closing her eyes and smiling. “I’m only human.”

\---

(Allison is born human. Scott is born h+. Years later, when there is grey in Allison’s hair and still red in Scott’s eyes, they will find a scarred tree with steel in its bark and initials in its memory.)


End file.
